Customer Reviews

Sharp LC-26D7U 26-Inch AQUOS Liquid-Crystal TV with Integrated HDTV Tuner

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Most my review is on the DVI capablilities of this TV. I purchased a refurbished set.

I use this as mainly a monitor hooked up to my computer, but I also watch cable on it from time to time. TV Guide works fine for me; no extra box, strait from the cable; there is an initial setup though, probably where the other guy went wrong. Moving around in TV Guide is kind of slow--I guess that's inherent of TV Guide, though, and the preview channel isn't locked initially, but you can change that through the TV Guide settings. Being a wide aspect ratio TV, I usually watch cable TV letter boxed at the sides. But you can simply change the view mode with the press of the the view mode button; sometimes I switch to zoom mode. I don't find watching cable TV on LCD screens as good as with CRTs mainly because of the graininess of the cable signal that is usually blurred and not seen by the average CRT.

There are alot of settings to play with, and the menus are intuitive. Lots of inputs, my favorite being DVI-D dual layer. I usually watch movies played from my computer's dvd player. The picture is awsome. Although, there was alot of playing with settings but the menus give you control of all of them. I sync'd the display using the test pattern in the "Display Optimization Wizard" of nVidia properties for my video card(7800GT). I further tweeked the picture with an Avia DVD(not included) that I bought recently. It had alot of test patterns to play with. From the DVI input I was a little overwhelmed by the hue and saturation for each seperate color(R/Y/G/C/B/M). I ended up only having to adjust color values--this is the first time I saw a monitor that could change color values independently. Hue and saturation seem to be fine at default settings.

Setting are independent from input to input. The detachable speaker is a nice feature.

Through this experience, I realized how crappy my computer monitor(NEC MultiSync LCD1770NX--The contrast is adequet but the brightness at 100% is still lacking) was. Skin tones are very good on this TV, where as on my computer monitor, skin tones were more orangy.

Still out of the box I was blown away by the picture. But with some(or alot in my case) of adjustment the picture is imaculate. I enjoyed things that you can tinker with.

Some of my criteria for buying this set:

DVI-D or HDMI input (this has both--alot of similar products have one or the other)

Wide screen aspect ratio (1280X768 in DVI "mode"; my video card doesn't support 1366X768--don't think many do)

The detachable speaker was an added bonus.

The contrast ratio caught my eye when purchasing; now that I have it, I am very enthused by the picture reproduction.

Pros.

lots of inputs
great picture
easy setup TV Guide
lots of settings to play with
good interface
relitively lightweight

Cons.

By default in DVI mode the blue color value is noticeably low(didn't figure this out till I used Avia) but is easily corrected in the Advanced menu under the Picture menu in C.M.S.-Value, I had to adjust Blue to +16 whereas the other colors I adjustusted minutely. This might be a common theme with all the inputs; I haven't looked into it yet.

All the color adjustments, although the experience was pleasent since I learned a little something, and now I get great video reproduction.

Graininess of cable TV although better than alot of LCD TV I've seen. You can't really blame the TV for a crappy source.

You can't tilt the screen up or down(I guess that's a bit much).

Led lights in the bottom right corner can be distracting(nothing a little tape can't fix)

All in all this TV has exeeded my expectations

TV Guide shows incorrect cable listings, nil support from TV Guide, cable company can't help, Sharp blames cable company, cable company blames Sharp. On board clock shows incorrect time which is impossible to ajust. Only decent picture obtainable is on HD Cable. Sharp Support not impressive, overall a disappointment